Buffalo Bill and the Town He Built
Near Cody, Wyoming
You are standing in a town that a showman dreamed into existence. William Frederick Cody, known the world over as Buffalo Bill, first rode through this corner of Wyoming's Bighorn Basin in the eighteen seventies, and he never forgot the mountains, the rivers, and the strange rock formations he saw. By the eighteen nineties he was arguably the most famous American alive.
He had scouted for the Army, ridden for the Pony Express in his youth, and in eighteen eighty three he had turned his own frontier life into a spectacle called Buffalo Bill's Wild West. It was an outdoor extravaganza of cowboys, sharpshooters, and Native performers that at its height employed as many as one thousand two hundred people. His stars included the rifle marksman Annie Oakley and, for one season in eighteen eighty five, the Lakota leader Sitting Bull.
In eighteen eighty seven he took the whole show to London and played to more than two and a half million ticket holders, performing for Queen Victoria herself. But Cody wanted to build something that would outlast the applause. In eighteen ninety five he and a group of investors formed the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company, and they began digging a canal to carry water from the South Fork of the Shoshone River out to dry ground.
In eighteen ninety six the town of Cody was laid out on that land. He bet everything on irrigation, on the beauty of the scenery, and on the pull of nearby Yellowstone, the world's first national park, which had been established in eighteen seventy two just to the west. By nineteen hundred the town held a little more than three hundred people, and in nineteen oh one it was incorporated.
Cody built a hotel here, brought in a railroad, and worked to make this the eastern doorway to Yellowstone. He died in nineteen seventeen, but the gamble paid off. Today roughly four and a half million people pass through this region every year on their way to the park.
The frontier legend is long gone, yet the town he willed into being is still here, still bearing his name, still selling the West he helped invent.
